Introducing Sockii: HTTP and WebSocket aggregator
Developing the upcoming Server Density v2 over the past year has forced us to tackle some very interesting and difficult problems. This post introduces Sockii, a Node.js daemon which aggregates [...]
Using Celery for queuing requests
For Server Density v2 we’ve taken a lot of time to redesign how we handle our website monitoring, particularly in relation to how we avoid false positives. We’ve also added [...]
What causes delays in software projects
For the last few weeks I’ve been testing a new storage backend for the server monitoring time series data we collect in Server Density, used to power our graphs and [...]
Monitoring the MongoDB shard balancer status
When you are using sharding built into MongoDB, it automatically manages moving data around and keeping things balanced. You can view the current status of the cluster to see where [...]
Visualizing server metrics with sparklines in the terminal
As part of our company random week where we work on our own project ideas, I set out to provide a new tool for every ops toolbelt – a Server [...]
Notes on using Memcached through PHP and Python
Everyone knows that memcached is an extremely fast in-memory cache. We recently started using it for caching elements in our frontend – servers, alerts, etc – but are now also [...]
Python daemon class
Our server monitoring agent has always run as a daemon on Unix, Linux and OS X because you want it to just work and not be messing with background tasks [...]
Android push notifications (tutorial)
Perhaps the most important feature of our server monitoring iPhone and Android apps is the ability to receive alerts via push notification directly to your device. On the iPhone, notifications [...]
Using vCloud and Amazon CloudWatch with libcloud
One feature in our server monitoring application, Server Density, and indeed the one I had quite a bit of fun developing, is our cloud provider support. To clarify, we deem [...]
Updating Python on RHEL/CentOS
All our production servers run Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 with the system supplied packages for the majority of applications we run, with the exception of PHP which we [...]